The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle

CHAPTER V

“Question!”

What with the physical shocks incidental to my first interview with Professor Challenger and the
mental ones which accompanied the second, I was a somewhat demoralized journalist by the time I found myself in Enmore
Park once more. In my aching head the one thought was throbbing that there really was truth in this man’s story, that
it was of tremendous consequence, and that it would work up into inconceivable copy for the Gazette when I could obtain
permission to use it. A taxicab was waiting at the end of the road, so I sprang into it and drove down to the office.
McArdle was at his post as usual.

“Well,” he cried, expectantly, “what may it run to? I’m thinking, young man, you have been in the wars. Don’t tell
me that he assaulted you.”

“We had a little difference at first.”

“What a man it is! What did you do?”

“Well, he became more reasonable and we had a chat. But I got nothing out of him — nothing for publication.”

“I’m not so sure about that. You got a black eye out of him, and that’s for publication. We can’t have this reign of
terror, Mr. Malone. We must bring the man to his bearings. I’ll have a leaderette on him tomorrow that will raise a
blister. Just give me the material and I will engage to brand the fellow for ever. Professor Munchausen — how’s that
for an inset headline? Sir John Mandeville redivivus — Cagliostro — all the imposters and bullies in history. I’ll show
him up for the fraud he is.”

“I wouldn’t do that, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because he is not a fraud at all.”

“What!” roared McArdle. “You don’t mean to say you really believe this stuff of his about mammoths and mastodons and
great sea sairpents?”

“Well, I don’t know about that. I don’t think he makes any claims of that kind. But I do believe he has got
something new.”

“Then for Heaven’s sake, man, write it up!”

“I’m longing to, but all I know he gave me in confidence and on condition that I didn’t.” I condensed into a few
sentences the Professor’s narrative. “That’s how it stands.”

McArdle looked deeply incredulous.

“Well, Mr. Malone,” he said at last, “about this scientific meeting to-night; there can be no privacy about that,
anyhow. I don’t suppose any paper will want to report it, for Waldron has been reported already a dozen times, and no
one is aware that Challenger will speak. We may get a scoop, if we are lucky. You’ll be there in any case, so you’ll
just give us a pretty full report. I’ll keep space up to midnight.”

My day was a busy one, and I had an early dinner at the Savage Club with Tarp Henry, to whom I gave some account of
my adventures. He listened with a sceptical smile on his gaunt face, and roared with laughter on hearing that the
Professor had convinced me.

“My dear chap, things don’t happen like that in real life. People don’t stumble upon enormous discoveries and then
lose their evidence. Leave that to the novelists. The fellow is as full of tricks as the monkey-house at the Zoo. It’s
all bosh.”

“But the American poet?”

“He never existed.”

“I saw his sketch-book.”

“Challenger’s sketch-book.”

“You think he drew that animal?”

“Of course he did. Who else?”

“Well, then, the photographs?”

“There was nothing in the photographs. By your own admission you only saw a bird.”

“A pterodactyl.”

“That’s what HE says. He put the pterodactyl into your head.”

“Well, then, the bones?”

“First one out of an Irish stew. Second one vamped up for the occasion. If you are clever and know your business you
can fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph.”

I began to feel uneasy. Perhaps, after all, I had been premature in my acquiescence. Then I had a sudden happy
thought.

“Will you come to the meeting?” I asked.

Tarp Henry looked thoughtful.

“He is not a popular person, the genial Challenger,” said he. “A lot of people have accounts to settle with him. I
should say he is about the best-hated man in London. If the medical students turn out there will be no end of a rag. I
don’t want to get into a bear-garden.”

“You might at least do him the justice to hear him state his own case.”

“Well, perhaps it’s only fair. All right. I’m your man for the evening.”

When we arrived at the hall we found a much greater concourse than I had expected. A line of electric broughams
discharged their little cargoes of white-bearded professors, while the dark stream of humbler pedestrians, who crowded
through the arched door-way, showed that the audience would be popular as well as scientific. Indeed, it became evident
to us as soon as we had taken our seats that a youthful and even boyish spirit was abroad in the gallery and the back
portions of the hall. Looking behind me, I could see rows of faces of the familiar medical student type. Apparently the
great hospitals had each sent down their contingent. The behavior of the audience at present was good-humored, but
mischievous. Scraps of popular songs were chorused with an enthusiasm which was a strange prelude to a scientific
lecture, and there was already a tendency to personal chaff which promised a jovial evening to others, however
embarrassing it might be to the recipients of these dubious honors.

Thus, when old Doctor Meldrum, with his well-known curly-brimmed opera-hat, appeared upon the platform, there was
such a universal query of “Where DID you get that tile?” that he hurriedly removed it, and concealed it furtively under
his chair. When gouty Professor Wadley limped down to his seat there were general affectionate inquiries from all parts
of the hall as to the exact state of his poor toe, which caused him obvious embarrassment. The greatest demonstration
of all, however, was at the entrance of my new acquaintance, Professor Challenger, when he passed down to take his
place at the extreme end of the front row of the platform. Such a yell of welcome broke forth when his black beard
first protruded round the corner that I began to suspect Tarp Henry was right in his surmise, and that this assemblage
was there not merely for the sake of the lecture, but because it had got rumored abroad that the famous Professor would
take part in the proceedings.

There was some sympathetic laughter on his entrance among the front benches of well-dressed spectators, as though
the demonstration of the students in this instance was not unwelcome to them. That greeting was, indeed, a frightful
outburst of sound, the uproar of the carnivora cage when the step of the bucket-bearing keeper is heard in the
distance. There was an offensive tone in it, perhaps, and yet in the main it struck me as mere riotous outcry, the
noisy reception of one who amused and interested them, rather than of one they disliked or despised. Challenger smiled
with weary and tolerant contempt, as a kindly man would meet the yapping of a litter of puppies. He sat slowly down,
blew out his chest, passed his hand caressingly down his beard, and looked with drooping eyelids and supercilious eyes
at the crowded hall before him. The uproar of his advent had not yet died away when Professor Ronald Murray, the
chairman, and Mr. Waldron, the lecturer, threaded their way to the front, and the proceedings began.

Professor Murray will, I am sure, excuse me if I say that he has the common fault of most Englishmen of being
inaudible. Why on earth people who have something to say which is worth hearing should not take the slight trouble to
learn how to make it heard is one of the strange mysteries of modern life. Their methods are as reasonable as to try to
pour some precious stuff from the spring to the reservoir through a non-conducting pipe, which could by the least
effort be opened. Professor Murray made several profound remarks to his white tie and to the water-carafe upon the
table, with a humorous, twinkling aside to the silver candlestick upon his right. Then he sat down, and Mr. Waldron,
the famous popular lecturer, rose amid a general murmur of applause. He was a stern, gaunt man, with a harsh voice, and
an aggressive manner, but he had the merit of knowing how to assimilate the ideas of other men, and to pass them on in
a way which was intelligible and even interesting to the lay public, with a happy knack of being funny about the most
unlikely objects, so that the precession of the Equinox or the formation of a vertebrate became a highly humorous
process as treated by him.

It was a bird’s-eye view of creation, as interpreted by science, which, in language always clear and sometimes
picturesque, he unfolded before us. He told us of the globe, a huge mass of flaming gas, flaring through the heavens.
Then he pictured the solidification, the cooling, the wrinkling which formed the mountains, the steam which turned to
water, the slow preparation of the stage upon which was to be played the inexplicable drama of life. On the origin of
life itself he was discreetly vague. That the germs of it could hardly have survived the original roasting was, he
declared, fairly certain. Therefore it had come later. Had it built itself out of the cooling, inorganic elements of
the globe? Very likely. Had the germs of it arrived from outside upon a meteor? It was hardly conceivable. On the
whole, the wisest man was the least dogmatic upon the point. We could not — or at least we had not succeeded up to date
in making organic life in our laboratories out of inorganic materials. The gulf between the dead and the living was
something which our chemistry could not as yet bridge. But there was a higher and subtler chemistry of Nature, which,
working with great forces over long epochs, might well produce results which were impossible for us. There the matter
must be left.

This brought the lecturer to the great ladder of animal life, beginning low down in molluscs and feeble sea
creatures, then up rung by rung through reptiles and fishes, till at last we came to a kangaroo-rat, a creature which
brought forth its young alive, the direct ancestor of all mammals, and presumably, therefore, of everyone in the
audience. (“No, no,” from a sceptical student in the back row.) If the young gentleman in the red tie who cried “No,
no,” and who presumably claimed to have been hatched out of an egg, would wait upon him after the lecture, he would be
glad to see such a curiosity. (Laughter.) It was strange to think that the climax of all the age-long process of Nature
had been the creation of that gentleman in the red tie. But had the process stopped? Was this gentleman to be taken as
the final type — the be-all and end-all of development? He hoped that he would not hurt the feelings of the gentleman
in the red tie if he maintained that, whatever virtues that gentleman might possess in private life, still the vast
processes of the universe were not fully justified if they were to end entirely in his production. Evolution was not a
spent force, but one still working, and even greater achievements were in store.

Having thus, amid a general titter, played very prettily with his interrupter, the lecturer went back to his picture
of the past, the drying of the seas, the emergence of the sand-bank, the sluggish, viscous life which lay upon their
margins, the overcrowded lagoons, the tendency of the sea creatures to take refuge upon the mud-flats, the abundance of
food awaiting them, their consequent enormous growth. “Hence, ladies and gentlemen,” he added, “that frightful brood of
saurians which still affright our eyes when seen in the Wealden or in the Solenhofen slates, but which were fortunately
extinct long before the first appearance of mankind upon this planet.”

“Question!” boomed a voice from the platform.

Mr. Waldron was a strict disciplinarian with a gift of acid humor, as exemplified upon the gentleman with the red
tie, which made it perilous to interrupt him. But this interjection appeared to him so absurd that he was at a loss how
to deal with it. So looks the Shakespearean who is confronted by a rancid Baconian, or the astronomer who is assailed
by a flat-earth fanatic. He paused for a moment, and then, raising his voice, repeated slowly the words: “Which were
extinct before the coming of man.”

“Question!” boomed the voice once more.

Waldron looked with amazement along the line of professors upon the platform until his eyes fell upon the figure of
Challenger, who leaned back in his chair with closed eyes and an amused expression, as if he were smiling in his
sleep.

“I see!” said Waldron, with a shrug. “It is my friend Professor Challenger,” and amid laughter he renewed his
lecture as if this was a final explanation and no more need be said.

But the incident was far from being closed. Whatever path the lecturer took amid the wilds of the past seemed
invariably to lead him to some assertion as to extinct or prehistoric life which instantly brought the same bulls’
bellow from the Professor. The audience began to anticipate it and to roar with delight when it came. The packed
benches of students joined in, and every time Challenger’s beard opened, before any sound could come forth, there was a
yell of “Question!” from a hundred voices, and an answering counter cry of “Order!” and “Shame!” from as many more.
Waldron, though a hardened lecturer and a strong man, became rattled. He hesitated, stammered, repeated himself, got
snarled in a long sentence, and finally turned furiously upon the cause of his troubles.

“This is really intolerable!” he cried, glaring across the platform. “I must ask you, Professor Challenger, to cease
these ignorant and unmannerly interruptions.”

There was a hush over the hall, the students rigid with delight at seeing the high gods on Olympus quarrelling among
themselves. Challenger levered his bulky figure slowly out of his chair.

“I must in turn ask you, Mr. Waldron,” he said, “to cease to make assertions which are not in strict accordance with
scientific fact.”

The words unloosed a tempest. “Shame! Shame!” “Give him a hearing!” “Put him out!” “Shove him off the platform!”
“Fair play!” emerged from a general roar of amusement or execration. The chairman was on his feet flapping both his
hands and bleating excitedly. “Professor Challenger — personal — views — later,” were the solid peaks above his clouds
of inaudible mutter. The interrupter bowed, smiled, stroked his beard, and relapsed into his chair. Waldron, very
flushed and warlike, continued his observations. Now and then, as he made an assertion, he shot a venomous glance at
his opponent, who seemed to be slumbering deeply, with the same broad, happy smile upon his face.

At last the lecture came to an end — I am inclined to think that it was a premature one, as the peroration was
hurried and disconnected. The thread of the argument had been rudely broken, and the audience was restless and
expectant. Waldron sat down, and, after a chirrup from the chairman, Professor Challenger rose and advanced to the edge
of the platform. In the interests of my paper I took down his speech verbatim.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he began, amid a sustained interruption from the back. “I beg pardon — Ladies, Gentlemen,
and Children — I must apologize, I had inadvertently omitted a considerable section of this audience” (tumult, during
which the Professor stood with one hand raised and his enormous head nodding sympathetically, as if he were bestowing a
pontifical blessing upon the crowd), “I have been selected to move a vote of thanks to Mr. Waldron for the very
picturesque and imaginative address to which we have just listened. There are points in it with which I disagree, and
it has been my duty to indicate them as they arose, but, none the less, Mr. Waldron has accomplished his object well,
that object being to give a simple and interesting account of what he conceives to have been the history of our planet.
Popular lectures are the easiest to listen to, but Mr. Waldron” (here he beamed and blinked at the lecturer) “will
excuse me when I say that they are necessarily both superficial and misleading, since they have to be graded to the
comprehension of an ignorant audience.” (Ironical cheering.) “Popular lecturers are in their nature parasitic.” (Angry
gesture of protest from Mr. Waldron.) “They exploit for fame or cash the work which has been done by their indigent and
unknown brethren. One smallest new fact obtained in the laboratory, one brick built into the temple of science, far
outweighs any second-hand exposition which passes an idle hour, but can leave no useful result behind it. I put forward
this obvious reflection, not out of any desire to disparage Mr. Waldron in particular, but that you may not lose your
sense of proportion and mistake the acolyte for the high priest.” (At this point Mr. Waldron whispered to the chairman,
who half rose and said something severely to his water-carafe.) “But enough of this!” (Loud and prolonged cheers.) “Let
me pass to some subject of wider interest. What is the particular point upon which I, as an original investigator, have
challenged our lecturer’s accuracy? It is upon the permanence of certain types of animal life upon the earth. I do not
speak upon this subject as an amateur, nor, I may add, as a popular lecturer, but I speak as one whose scientific
conscience compels him to adhere closely to facts, when I say that Mr. Waldron is very wrong in supposing that because
he has never himself seen a so-called prehistoric animal, therefore these creatures no longer exist. They are indeed,
as he has said, our ancestors, but they are, if I may use the expression, our contemporary ancestors, who can still be
found with all their hideous and formidable characteristics if one has but the energy and hardihood to seek their
haunts. Creatures which were supposed to be Jurassic, monsters who would hunt down and devour our largest and fiercest
mammals, still exist.” (Cries of “Bosh!” “Prove it!” “How do YOU know?” “Question!”) “How do I know, you ask me? I know
because I have visited their secret haunts. I know because I have seen some of them.” (Applause, uproar, and a voice,
“Liar!”) “Am I a liar?” (General hearty and noisy assent.) “Did I hear someone say that I was a liar? Will the person
who called me a liar kindly stand up that I may know him?” (A voice, “Here he is, sir!” and an inoffensive little
person in spectacles, struggling violently, was held up among a group of students.) “Did you venture to call me a
liar?” (“No, sir, no!” shouted the accused, and disappeared like a jack-inthe-box.) “If any person in this hall dares
to doubt my veracity, I shall be glad to have a few words with him after the lecture.” (“Liar!”) “Who said that?”
(Again the inoffensive one plunging desperately, was elevated high into the air.) “If I come down among you ——”
(General chorus of “Come, love, come!” which interrupted the proceedings for some moments, while the chairman, standing
up and waving both his arms, seemed to be conducting the music. The Professor, with his face flushed, his nostrils
dilated, and his beard bristling, was now in a proper Berserk mood.) “Every great discoverer has been met with the same
incredulity — the sure brand of a generation of fools. When great facts are laid before you, you have not the
intuition, the imagination which would help you to understand them. You can only throw mud at the men who have risked
their lives to open new fields to science. You persecute the prophets! Galileo! Darwin, and I——” (Prolonged cheering
and complete interruption.)

All this is from my hurried notes taken at the time, which give little notion of the absolute chaos to which the
assembly had by this time been reduced. So terrific was the uproar that several ladies had already beaten a hurried
retreat. Grave and reverend seniors seemed to have caught the prevailing spirit as badly as the students, and I saw
white-bearded men rising and shaking their fists at the obdurate Professor. The whole great audience seethed and
simmered like a boiling pot. The Professor took a step forward and raised both his hands. There was something so big
and arresting and virile in the man that the clatter and shouting died gradually away before his commanding gesture and
his masterful eyes. He seemed to have a definite message. They hushed to hear it.

“I will not detain you,” he said. “It is not worth it. Truth is truth, and the noise of a number of foolish young
men — and, I fear I must add, of their equally foolish seniors — cannot affect the matter. I claim that I have opened a
new field of science. You dispute it.” (Cheers.) “Then I put you to the test. Will you accredit one or more of your own
number to go out as your representatives and test my statement in your name?”

Mr. Summerlee, the veteran Professor of Comparative Anatomy, rose among the audience, a tall, thin, bitter man, with
the withered aspect of a theologian. He wished, he said, to ask Professor Challenger whether the results to which he
had alluded in his remarks had been obtained during a journey to the headwaters of the Amazon made by him two years
before.

Professor Challenger answered that they had.

Mr. Summerlee desired to know how it was that Professor Challenger claimed to have made discoveries in those regions
which had been overlooked by Wallace, Bates, and other previous explorers of established scientific repute.

Professor Challenger answered that Mr. Summerlee appeared to be confusing the Amazon with the Thames; that it was in
reality a somewhat larger river; that Mr. Summerlee might be interested to know that with the Orinoco, which
communicated with it, some fifty thousand miles of country were opened up, and that in so vast a space it was not
impossible for one person to find what another had missed.

Mr. Summerlee declared, with an acid smile, that he fully appreciated the difference between the Thames and the
Amazon, which lay in the fact that any assertion about the former could be tested, while about the latter it could not.
He would be obliged if Professor Challenger would give the latitude and the longitude of the country in which
prehistoric animals were to be found.

Professor Challenger replied that he reserved such information for good reasons of his own, but would be prepared to
give it with proper precautions to a committee chosen from the audience. Would Mr. Summerlee serve on such a committee
and test his story in person?

Mr. Summerlee: “Yes, I will.” (Great cheering.)

Professor Challenger: “Then I guarantee that I will place in your hands such material as will enable you to find
your way. It is only right, however, since Mr. Summerlee goes to check my statement that I should have one or more with
him who may check his. I will not disguise from you that there are difficulties and dangers. Mr. Summerlee will need a
younger colleague. May I ask for volunteers?”

It is thus that the great crisis of a man’s life springs out at him. Could I have imagined when I entered that hall
that I was about to pledge myself to a wilder adventure than had ever come to me in my dreams? But Gladys — was it not
the very opportunity of which she spoke? Gladys would have told me to go. I had sprung to my feet. I was speaking, and
yet I had prepared no words. Tarp Henry, my companion, was plucking at my skirts and I heard him whispering, “Sit down,
Malone! Don’t make a public ass of yourself.” At the same time I was aware that a tall, thin man, with dark gingery
hair, a few seats in front of me, was also upon his feet. He glared back at me with hard angry eyes, but I refused to
give way.

“I will go, Mr. Chairman,” I kept repeating over and over again.

“Name! Name!” cried the audience.

“My name is Edward Dunn Malone. I am the reporter of the Daily Gazette. I claim to be an absolutely unprejudiced
witness.”

“What is YOUR name, sir?” the chairman asked of my tall rival.

“I am Lord John Roxton. I have already been up the Amazon, I know all the ground, and have special qualifications
for this investigation.”

“Lord John Roxton’s reputation as a sportsman and a traveler is, of course, world-famous,” said the chairman; “at
the same time it would certainly be as well to have a member of the Press upon such an expedition.”

“Then I move,” said Professor Challenger, “that both these gentlemen be elected, as representatives of this meeting,
to accompany Professor Summerlee upon his journey to investigate and to report upon the truth of my statements.”

And so, amid shouting and cheering, our fate was decided, and I found myself borne away in the human current which
swirled towards the door, with my mind half stunned by the vast new project which had risen so suddenly before it. As I
emerged from the hall I was conscious for a moment of a rush of laughing students — down the pavement, and of an arm
wielding a heavy umbrella, which rose and fell in the midst of them. Then, amid a mixture of groans and cheers,
Professor Challenger’s electric brougham slid from the curb, and I found myself walking under the silvery lights of
Regent Street, full of thoughts of Gladys and of wonder as to my future.

Suddenly there was a touch at my elbow. I turned, and found myself looking into the humorous, masterful eyes of the
tall, thin man who had volunteered to be my companion on this strange quest.

“Mr. Malone, I understand,” said he. “We are to be companions — what? My rooms are just over the road, in the
Albany. Perhaps you would have the kindness to spare me half an hour, for there are one or two things that I badly want
to say to you.”